Oct 24, 2009

Vivek Wadhwa on the Unimportance of an Elite Education for Entrepreneurship

From The Washington Post

Got degree envy? No worries, you can still make it big.

By Vivek Wadhwa

So you couldn't get into Stanford, Berkeley or Harvard, huh? Don't sweat it. You can still make it big. Some people might believe that an Ivy League education provides a huge advantage in entrepreneurship. But after researching this over and over again, I've found no such correlation. To the contrary, it seems that those who are born without the silver spoons in their mouths are more motivated to succeed. And those who aren't members of elite alum societies develop the skills needed to hustle in the rough and tough business world. The Ivy-Leaguers may be able to get their buddies from Sequoia and Kleiner to return emails, but they aren't going to be any more successful at building companies. ...

Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley [School of Information], Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016